THE GUASO NYERO 
293 
north toward the Guaso Nyero. Heller was under the 
weather, and we left him to spend a few days at Meru 
boma, and then to take in the elephant skins and other 
museum specimens to Nairobi. 
As Cuninghame and I were to be nearly four weeks in 
a country with no food supplies, we took a small donkey 
safari to carry the extra food for our porters—for in these 
remote places the difficulty of taking in many hundred 
pounds of salt, as well as skin tents, and the difficulty 
of bringing out the skeletons and skins of the big animals 
collected, make such an expedition as ours, undertaken 
for scientific purposes, far more cumbersome and unwieldy 
than a mere hunting trip, or even than a voyage of explo¬ 
ration, and trebles the labor. 
A long day’s march brought us down to the hot country. 
That evening we pitched our tents by a rapid brook, bor¬ 
dered by palms, whose long, stiff fronds rustled ceaselessly 
in the wind. Monkeys swung in the tree tops. On the 
march I shot a Kavirondo crane on the wing with the little 
Springfield, almost exactly repeating my experience with 
the other crane which I had shot three weeks before, ex¬ 
cept that on this occasion I brought down the bird with 
my third bullet, and then wasted the last two cartridges in 
the magazine at his companions. At dusk the donkeys 
were driven to a fire within the camp, and they stood pa¬ 
tiently round it in a circle throughout the night, safe from 
lions and hyenas. 
Next day’s march brought us to another small tributary 
of the Guaso Nyero, a little stream twisting rapidly through 
the plain, between sheer banks. Here and there it was 
edged with palms and beds of bulrushes. We pitched the 
